Gilroy

When Tony Gilroy and his Andor star Diego Luna decided to cram half a decade’s worth of new Star Wars lore into three episodes per year leading up to the events of Rogue One, they knew the task was unbelievably ambitious. In a chat with the Wrap, Gilroy expressed the excitement everyone involved felt over their great big heist of an entry into Lucasfilm’s Star Wars lore.

“We kept waiting for it to fail, going, ‘There must be something that’s going to bite us here.’ We kept waiting for a bugaboo that never appeared,” he said. “I wrote the top and the tail of each block to set the frame for each year. And I took that into the writers’ room so nobody could tell me that it wouldn’t work. And then we filled in from there.”

Now with the Disney+ series at an end and awards season kicking in, Andor’s mission is one fans would say really paid off for the critically acclaimed show. No one really cared that it didn’t tie into shows like The Mandalorian or Ahsoka and Gilroy wasn’t forced to embed any sort of direct lines to get more viewers to those shows.

“I paid rigorous attention to the canon that I’m supposed to pay attention to. I’ve ignored the canon that I’m allowed to ignore,” he stated, but that doesn’t mean his canon if off the table for other projects: “I don’t own the IP, so they can do what they want.”

Instead Gilroy was able to say goodbye to his characters on his own terms. He told the trade that key final moments such as Dedra’s face-off with Luthen, and when Andor meets a Force healer in probably the only time the energy which courses through Star Wars was directly mentioned, didn’t all come together that meticulously. “You spend so much time constructing and tearing down in your imagination. It’s just such a constant process,” he said about how the series still surprised him as they finished the last scene.

“I wanted to be able to not feel like a sadist with what I was doing with these characters and have some hope,” he said of the moment we see Bix in the field with her and Andor’s child facing out into the future; to Gilroy, that’s the close to his time with Star Wars. “Legit hope. Not cheesy T-shirt hope, but real hope.”

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The adventures of rebel spy Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) powered Andor‘s two epic seasons. But getting to know who he was through those he loves is what catapulted the character from Rogue One one-off into the pantheon of beloved Star Wars heroes. Seeing the added layers of his family and friend circle captivated audiences and introduced us to even more characters we hope to see more of in the future, including his partner and romantic interest, Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona). A rebel heroine in her own right, Caleen pretty much stole our hearts too, but dashed the hopes of Jyn Erso and Cassian shippers across the fandom galaxy.

The fleeting tension in Rogue One‘s elevator scene between the two rebels on the trail of the Death Star plans—who then embrace one another in their final moments—had the fandom taking the mere tease of a romance to mean more. It’s something Andor creator and Rogue One co-writer Tony Gilroy is well aware of.

“I knew very well what had happened with Jyn and Cassian in Rogue One and what had happened in the elevator,” he told Collider; it’s something he truncated in the process of re-working the film (there was a kiss shot originally).

“I knew that scene very, very well. I probably went back and looked at that. I was pleased to see that my memory of it was of all the other takes and other things, and I was really pleased to see how we’d edited that, that it was really ambiguous about what it was, and then I didn’t care anymore. I was like, ‘Okay. It makes sense.’”

He explained that Cassian and Bix’s love story realistically explores the dynamic of two people who have been in each other’s lives for longer than a mission, and who we meet while they’re very much not together. “I mean, they’re both pretty sexually liberated in their way,” he said. “I think that first kiss they had, I think the first person they ever slept with is each other. Who knows how old they were on Ferrix? Probably very, very young. And over time, they were together and not together.”

They’ve clearly had their own separate life experiences. “Timm starts off the show, and who’s in charge of that relationship, right?” Gilroy said, calling out Bix’s not-long-for-the-world jealous beau on Ferrix. “Cassian certainly has a rich history in just the little bit we see, and has alluded to, and his mother calls him out on all his girlfriends, and there’s Windi on Niamos. I think they have a very healthy idea of what the different calibrations of love are.”

So yes, Cassian and Jyn may have had a moment but its informed by the knowledge of their win against the Empire. “I mean, why wouldn’t you hold somebody’s hand at the end of the world?” Gilroy said. “I felt bad for the people who had invested so much time in the fan fiction and stuff like that. The people who really had gone deep on it. It’s not considered canon, and it’s not something I have to pay attention to, legally, within the order, but people worked hard on that stuff, and it meant a lot to them. You don’t want to trample on somebody’s flower garden, you know? But I have to do what I have to do.”

As the writer, who is actual steward of the lore, Gilroy at least offered his condolences for blasting the ship along with the Scarif shore Cassian and Jyn held each other on, stating, “I’m sure there’s somebody who will never get over that. I apologize. I really do.”

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Tony Gilroy Created His Own ‘Star Wars’ Endings and Aimed for ‘Legit Hope’

Tony Gilroy Knows ‘Andor’ Broke the Heart of Cassian and Jyn Shippers